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MISSING MAN: THE AMERICAN SPY WHO VANISHED IN IRAN<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n By Barry Meier<\/em><\/p>\n Farrar Straus Giroux, $27.00, \u00a0273 pp.<\/em><\/p>\n The American public \u2014 especially the media \u2014 tends to demand, \u201cWho\u2019s to blame?\u201d when a person vanishes in a foreign land with no explanation as to why, or whether, he is being held.<\/p>\n Such is the case with Robert Levinson<\/a>, former FBI<\/a> agent, private investigator and CIA<\/a> contractor, who was snatched by unknown parties on the Iranian-owned island of Kish in 2013. Suspicion immediately pointed to Iranian<\/a> security officers.<\/p>\n As a private investigator, Mr. Levinson<\/a> was traveling under an assumed name, ostensibly trying to track sellers of counterfeit cigarettes on behalf of a client, British American Tobacco.<\/p>\n Salahuddin fled to Iran<\/a>, but soon tired of the mullahs\u2019 government. He told investigators and journalists who were friends with Mr. Levinson<\/a>than he had \u201csecrets of enormous value to U.S. intelligence\u201d because of his access to officials in the regime. Mr. Levinson<\/a> seized what he saw as an opportunity to tighten his relationship with the CIA<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u00a0But he also had a sub rosa purpose. On his own initiative, he hoped to recruit as a CIA<\/a> informant, a man who was born as Teddy Belfield, converted to Islam while a student at Howard University, and took the name Dawud Salahuddin. In 1980, on behalf of anti-Shah Iranian<\/a> radicals, Salahuddin posed as a postal carrier and shot dead a spokesman for the Iranian embassy in Washington at his Bethesda home.<\/div>\n